Now clearly, and regardless of one's views either way on the eventual outcome, the endgame of the last US Presidential Election made it pretty clear to those of us in the 'Rest Of World' that the US' much-vaunted electoral democracy is in need of a pretty thorough technical and procedural shakeup before it could be judged Fair, Free and Open to international standards. clearly these bizarre punch-card machines with all that 'chad' nonsense have to go as they're making any US claim to be a bastion of democracy look entirely farcical.
But does the solution to that problem automatically involve electronic ballots?
From an outsider's perspective, the problem with the 2000 election certainly suggested that those machines of yours are not up to the job. But then most countries don't use machines for that sort of thing, we use people, lots of people if need be, watched by other people, lots of those too, with clearly marked easily counted easily audited pieces of paper, one per vote per ballot (UK-wise we wouldn't have had the butterfly ballot issue because if n elections coincide, we get n ballot papers, one for each election). Straight binary, you put your one mark in the box for a specific candidate, or you spoilt your ballot, no resort to subjective decisions about 'hanging chads'.
Frankly, electronic voting would just be a shiny, expensive distraction from actually looking at the electoral system and identifying the most trustworthy way to operate within it. If it's going to take such an effort to get electronic voting trusted, then it must perforce fail the very first and most trivial test of a voting system.
So far as I can see, the main benefactors of electronic voting would be the TV networks as it would make scheduling on election night (and thereafter in the case of a disputed result) so much easier. I'm pretty sure Messrs Washington, Jefferson and Madison didn't have a major problem with waiting a couple of weeks for the results to come in and any problems resolved. In fact isn't that the whole point of your delayed-inauguration approach to the Presidency?
Do you really want 300 million people governed according to a voting system optimised for the convenience of media corporations? Wouldn't it be better to look at optimising it for representativeness instead?
even if the code is opensource, how can you be sure the voting machine executable has been compiled from the genuine source code ?
And herein lies a nice can of worms straight outta RISKS. Not only do we need to know that the binary in use has been compiled from the genuine source code, you also need to be confident that it was compiled with a trustworthy (preferably also Open-Sourced, GCC perhaps?) compiler in a trustworthy environment.
And then there's the firmware on the machine itself.
Geek that I am I can still see enormous strengths to our wonderfully archaic paper-ballot system here in the UK. You put a cross in a box on a piece of paper with a pen. If you mess up the cross you spoilt your ballot. At the count, for each person actually sorting and bundling ballot papers there are two people watching like a hawk (I tend to be one of these) to make sure they're counting and sorting OK. So long as the contituencies are reasonably sized, a result by the next morning seems OK when Right definitely outweighs Quick or Cheap. And therein lies the crux. So WHAT if it takes a week to get the correct result?
[Bill Gates:] "You can't ever take it and use it in a job creating activity."
Yeah, this was the bit where I spluttered. And I'm a total Moft-serf, i work pretty much entirely with Moft stuff, WinForms, ASP.net, MSSQLserver, on Win2k, but still, please, Bill?!
We're a fulfilment and marketing company. I may be Moft-boy, but it's pretty clear to me that if we were running Apache instead of IIS, Linux instead of win2k, A N Other database server (need those triggers, need those ACID transactions) instead of MSSQL, if we were writing it all in C++ or Python or Java or...
There would still be jobs in Client Services. There would still be jobs in the Call Centre. There would still be jobs in Data Capture, there would still be pick-and-pack jobs in the warehouse. There would still be jobs in Finance, there would still be jobs in Sales. There would still be developer and admin jobs in IT.
Bill, listen to the guy you just hired, the emotional stuff REALLY doesn't help (y)our case.
Sure, who can forget the classic scene in B7 where they go back to Earth and a robot spider thing jumps into the hick cop's asshole, while the sex slave/giant worm/pod person clone chick version #2 gets her kit off (again) and the zombie goth runs out of zombie goth go-juice (yet again).
The robot spider thing is in "The Harvest Of Kairos" (series C ep5), B7 had a psychotic, scheming, vampy campy manipulative white-clad dominatrix as head of Federation Space Command in the 'weird chick' role, unless telepathic guerilla chicks are more your thing, and the Zombie Goths (the federation Mutoids, or 'vampires') ran out of zombiegoth go-juice all too often to maintain any credibility as a fearsome fighting tool, but most especially in "Duel" (series A ep8).
Plus B7 had a nice line in murderous alien dwarf chess champions, living intelligent telepathic drugs, fiendishly clever psychostrategists, alien space plagues, bodysnatching invaders from the Andromeda galaxy, man-eating planet-sized supercomputers, Space Rats with dayglo mohicans on quad-bikes, a Tachyon Funnel...
No shortage of OTT in Blake's 7, made a nice foil to the totalitarian military-industrial state, the easy brutality of power, the working-class grime of the glorious future, betrayal, deceit, corruption and the eventual utter futility of resistance, I thought.
Blake's 7 does not date from the early 80's, it dates from 1978
Right on the mark. Series A Episode 1 "The Way Back" aired on 2nd Jan 1978, Series D Episode 13, "Blake" aired on 21st Dec 1981. So B7 very neatly spanned the cusp of 70s and 80s.
as long as the writing is up to the same standard (And hopefully Paul Darrow will make sure of that!)
If he's got any sense left at all, he'll get straight onto Chris Boucher for the scripts. While Terry Nation came up with the concept and nominally wrote most of the first season, as with his Doctor Who work which was all heavily retooled by the relevant Script Editor, Nation came up with the concepts, Boucher made it into workable scripts, and is still working in the same genre with very similar dramatic contexts. Boucher's good, hire Boucher.
Now that Alan Yentob is no longer its controller we may even get a sci-fi series on BBC1 again. IIRC he was the reason Dr Who was axed
Actually, it was Michael Grade who axed the show, he was quite determined to do it as he considered that it had become an embarrassment to the BBC in the state it had reached.
Yentob came later and is IIRC on record as having been a fan in his youth. and as for the stuff the current Controller, Lorraine Heggessey, has been saying about Doctor Who recently, it's mainly IP rights negotiations that are holding back televised SF on prime-time BBC.
Nothing new here at all. Paul Darrow acquired the rights to make new B7 from Terry Nation about 15 years ago and has been media-pushing it in the hope of getting some funds about once a year ever since. It's been 'about to return' as a movie or TV series for a long time now.
Which isn't to say that I don't consider it worthy of a return, but it is hard to see how an Avon spin-off could reasonably be called Blake's 7. OK so in the original series, seasons 3 & 4 were missing Blake, right up until the final, wonderful, paranoid apocalypse in the final episode, but it was Blake's crew, still basically on Blake's mission, and wanted by the Federtaion because of their history with Blake.
In any case, if you want a fix of Blake's 7 style grit and pessimism, I can strongly recommend Chris Boucher's "Kaldor City" audios, in which the Paul Darrow character could very easily be a post-Blake, in-hiding Avon, which also features various characters Boucher originally created for Blake's 7, all set in the society (and with some of the characters) he built for the Doctor Who classic "Robots of Death"
I'd say, use B7 as an inspiration, sure, but it was effectively brought full-circle in 'Blake' and anything more would rather spoil the delicious uncompromising bleakness of that final showdown. How often DO the bad guys get to win?
While we're still using hard-drives, though, things may yet change beyond recognition.
The other day I came across this discussion between Jim Gray (MS Research) and David Patterson (Pardee Prof. at UC Berkeley) suggesting among other things that if the disks get much bigger (Terabytes) they're likely to be serial-access rather than random-access (the return of mag-tape, but flatter, because that way you could read a 20TB disk in a day instead of a year), and the return of sneakernet (for terabytes of data, it's cheaper to fed-ex a computer set up as a fileserver containing the data on a hard-drive than it is to ftp it. And the bitrate's better with the 12-hour delivery from fed-ex.
What the market will bear pricing works only because of this artificial segmentation of markets
Or, put another way, we will never know 'what the market will bear' so long as we have artificial segmentation of markets, which is exactly why the vendors will cling tenaciously to this model for as long as they can possibly get away with it.
Either you/we *are* believers in Free Markets, or we're not. If we are, then the artificial segmentation and, especially, the agricultural subsidies have to go, as they are glaringly incompatible with the model, or you/we would be better off admitting that you/we believe in a regulated, mixed, semi-state-controlled (in USian, 'socialist') market model and try to regulate the mix more fairly than at present.
We might have extradition treaties with the UK, but to invoke it [...] would completely overrun law enforcement offices
Hardly. Since our home secretary signed away our rights on Extradition issues with the US, all the US authorities have to do is specify whom they would like extradited, and under our new treaty obligations, we have to hand them over. the defendant is not permitted to waste US time and resources by having the extradition questioned in a british court, is not allowed to waste US time and resources by demanding access to any evidence which might exist against him/her, is not allowed to waste US time and resources by expecting a prima facie case to be presented at all.
US demands, we get shipped off to the US, end of story. Hardly a legal burden at all, since there's no legal component to the whole process.
Rather elegantly, this means it's now possible for a UK citizen to go all the way from freedom to the death-chamber at Guantanamo without the tedious and expensive involvement of a single Judge, let alone a Jury. I suspect it's probably now *harder* to extradite someone from the next State than from the UK.
Well, Zope is object oriented, has excellent seperation of presentation and business layer possibilities and once you know how it works, is very easy to get stuff done. Oh, and it is free.
free can also be achieved with.net. If you're prepared to deal with the EULA for the.net Framework SDK, then you can run with a variey of open sourced / Free IDE's or do the whole lot from the command line if that turns you on. Here's enough no-charge stuff to get you into a position to have a serious play with.net and get to know it:
Framework 1.1 redistibutable (23MB) The minimum requirement to get anywhere with.net, but you might prefer the rather more comprehensive:
Framework 1.1 SDK (106.2MB) All the commandline tools including the compilers for C# and vb.net, documentation as well as the framework libraries. If you don't want an IDE at all, this download is all you'll need.
Web Matrix (1.3MB) Free ASP.net IDE which fits on a floppy, requires only the redistributable rather than the whole SDK, and includes a working local-only webserver derived from:
Cassini Web Server (217kB) Open sourced, very simple web server for running ASP.net apps provided as a code sample. Only works on calls from the local machine but rem out one line of code and (if you're brave/foolhardy) this no longer applies. If you'd prefer to keep if Free as well as free (apart from the SDK of course), you could look at:
SharpDevelop (8.3MB source or 5.3MB executable) An open source GPLed IDE for C# with a little bit (so far) of VB.net support
That should be enough to get you straight in there (assuming you've got a windows box to run it all on of course, but if not, then why even think about it?).
Now personally, I'm very very fond of Visual Studio.net, but for running up a quick, not-many-pages data-driven web app, the Web Matrix can sometimes be the superior tool (the major difference is that VS.net pretty much enforces code-behind and has multi-file projects, whilst the Web Matrix works with inline code and a single file at a time. Certainly, the adoption has been slower then Microsoft would have liked, but then, my personal interpretation of the 'what is.net?' question is, at the moment, 'the win64 API, currently in preview on top of win32', and since the move to.net is essentially a move to a new platform, it's going to be no faster than the move to win32 from win16 before it. All.net questions seem to end up at 'it's the Common Language Runtime'
Give it a try, have a play around (esp. the web Matrix) and see what you like and what you don't. If nothing else, you'll learn to love some of the details of your favourite environment more than you did before.
Watching those guys toss those bikes around as they were riding in the tour this morning really wish i had it that easy
Watching those guys toss those bikes around makes me wish i had Lance Armstrong's resting heart rate of 32-34 bpm rather than the adult male average of 70 bpm. Or Miguel Indurain's 30 bpm, 50 litres-per minute peak heart flow rate, 8 litre lung capacity, and ability to get 150bpm up a steep hill and drop it back to 60 bpm within 30 seconds on the descent.
Once I can get within sight of that, maybe it might be worth worrying about the equipment. As things stand, put Armstrong on a rubbish kid's bike and me on 5 grand's worth of state of the art, and Armstrong will take me to the cleaners every time.
One of the things I like about Formula 1 is the way that there are strictly speaking two world championships, the Constructor's and the Driver's. It's not unusual for the winning driver to come from an also-ran constructor, particularly if the Driver's Champ drives as a clear number one with a significantly worse team-mate, and the Constructor's champ team runs two equal, reliable cars and gets a lot of points between them. Last year, Schumacher (M) and Ferrari took both titles, this year, as things stand after 10 races, the Driver's seems to be between Schumacher (M) and Kimi Raikonnen of McLaren, though Ralf Schumacher's catching up fast in his Williams, but the Constructor's is between Ferrari and Williams, since McLaren have been having trouble getting both cars into the good points.
Now, clearly, if one car really is streets ahead of the rest (last year's Ferrari, the 1992 Williams FW14B (swoon!), the 1988 McLaren MP 4/4 in the hands of Senna and Prost), then both titles will go together. But at least in F1, it's possible for a beyond-hope geek to actually see the sport as a form of competitive engineering and project management with some incidental racetrack mayhem to provide the test results. And the ability of these people to achieve constant product improvements, ever-increasing reliability, outrageous crash-safety, better handling, better aerodynamics, lighter components, an easier drive even, would be pretty astonishing even if it weren't on a two-week turnaround cycle throughout the season.
And to get back to where we started, the F1 drivers tend to be quite sickeningly fit too.
TomV
Re:Privacy implications are nill
on
Twist on DNA Privacy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
there's no common identity number in the UK
National Insurance number - we all get a card on our 16th birthday - [A-Z]{2}[0-9]{6}[A-Z] - every adult legitimately resident in the UK has one.
TomV
Re:Hmmmmmm I wonder...
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
I used to work for the British Civil Service
So did I, and you missed out my favourite holiday of all.
Queen's Birthday!
Or a day off in lieu if you worked it, and it was a great day to work since the offices were pretty much empty. When I first heard of it, as in "what are you doing next Wednesday?" I seriously thought they were taking the p*5*. But no, it was gloriously real. TomV
Don't you think that Microsoft would be the first company they would go after?
If i've grasped SCO's approach so far, I can see them trying something along the lines of:
IBM had an AT&T SysV 'viral' license
IBM subcontracted microsoft to provide (let's not go into the details) an OS for their first PCs
Therefore the SysV license 'virally' spread via the PC-DOS contract to cover PC-DOS
IBM further co-developed the early versions of OS/2 with microsoft
Thus 'all' of microsoft's OS experience is 'derived' from their co-operation with 'virally tainted' IBM. (remember that SCO appear to claim that IBM were entirely incapable of writing OS software until they had access to sysV UNIX source, which obviously has the ring of, er, ?)
Thus (look, did I ever say these guys weren't clinically deranged?) ALL microsoft OS's, from PC-DOS through to Windows Server 2003, are, in the greedy twinkling eyes of SCO, 'derived works' of AT&T UNIX as covered by its purportedly 'viral' license, and therefore the rightful property of SCO.
In which case a shareprice rise from 60 cents to 10 dollars is NOTHING.
Farcical, but at times it does begin to look as though the inheritance of the OS religious wars has come down to a claim by SCO that UNIX was indeed the 'one true OS' and that any other OS, by virtue simply of BEING an OS, must be a 'derived work' of same, and thus the rightful property of SCO.
Nice piece on chutzpah in yesterday's Guardian, by the way.
It's pretty clear. Several years ago, at the dawn of the OS now commonly known as "Linux", I read the original, true, eternal and ineffable Name of the OS, "GNU/Linux", decided that it was a bit unwieldy, thought about the GPL, optimised the Name a bit, and released my changes, along with instructions on how to implement them, as "Linux (just forget the GNU/ stuff, OK?)".
And this Fork of the Name, once a bit of extraneous stuff had been excised by other contributors, eventually became the name "Linux" used so widely today.
I can see that in the article, Stallman's point seems to be to reassure the PHB's reading zdnet that they don't need to suddenly get rid of all their Free Software because of the SCO case, that they needn't retreat into the arms of Closed software.
And I can utterly appreciate that he wants fair credit for the vast amount of work the GNU project put into "Linux", I just find it a tad odd that he can make such a cogent, consistent case for the Freedom of the software, whilst in the same breath telling off anyone who changes the name of the software.
Since that IP was licenced under the GPL, SCO/Caldera has no right to use it unless they release it under the GPL as well.
As far as I can gather, SCO's position seems to be, at its heart, that the old UNIX System V AT&T license (or rather, every single one of the numerous SysV licenses, AIX, Dynix, etc) was, to use a Ballmer-ism, 'viral', unstoppably so, in their view.
They've been pretty clear that anything designed to work with any flavour of UNIX, by anyone in possession of any variant of the SysV licence, is in their opinion, automatically part of 'the UNIX intellectual property'. Therefore, for example, because Sequent developed their NUMA code whilst bound by a SysV license for Dynix, SCO's position seems to be that NUMA is automatically theirs.
And from that position, it's easy to see how SCO would make the leap to claiming that there's no GPL issue with Linux, because ALL of the Linux code, due to the supposedly viral nature of the Sys V licenses, is theirs to start with, so not only would they claim the absolute right to distribute the Linux code as they please, they would also tend to the view that no one, not Torvalds, not Stallman, can claim any ownership of anything which interoperates with any system derived from any system with any ancestry which might have involved a viral SysV license. In SCO's view, if it works with UNIX, it's their property regardless of any other factors.
Now clearly this looks like a lot of self-serving boholox, but i can believe that the old (convicted monopolist, remember) AT&T might very well have put some thoroughly draconian terms into their licenses, and, horrifyingly, if the sysV licenses do turn out to be viral, then SCO wins, hands down.
I'd like to take issue with the comment that: [t]he fact is that if I sit a 4 year old in front of the ARTS channel all day they aren't going to come out with an appreciation of classical music.
My parents, born in the 1930's, never really got accultured to 'rock and roll'. I grew up in a house where 'pop' music, if played at all, meant stuff like Ella Fitzgerald or maybe a bit of Harry Belafonte. But really, 'music' meant classical, romantic, early C20th avant-garde.
Until I was about 10, I pretty much hadn't heard any music that didn't fall into the rather broad category summarized as 'classical'. And it seems rather hard for me to work out what, other than being sat down with BBC Radio 3 (very much a 'classical' station), led to me having an 'appreciation of classical music'. If I hadn't been exposed to quite a lot of it, how did I work out that J S Bach's all about sublime crystalline purity, that Sibelius is about huge, sweeping angst and yearning, that Brahms drives me to distraction, that Beethoven wrote the best tunes, or that Schoenberg hurts my ears:-) ? And I learned to imitate what I'd encountered, or why would I still catch myself whistling bits of sonatas and symphonies?
But then, as a child, I was heavily oppressed and brainwashed, with only the most carefully selected cultural propaganda allowed into the house. Out of choice, I have probably loved to watch big flashy loud stuff with explosions and fast action sequences and so forth, but we, the children, did not have control of the TV. Our thought processes and interpretations of the world were carefully, and selectively guided and trained according to my parents' views.
Thanks Mum, thanks Dad, for taking that responsibility and not leaving it to people who need first and foremost to sell advertising. TomV
Did all the genetics leave that place after the pharoahs fell?
well, if 'all the genetics [left] that place...' at all, it would have been a lot later. After al-Kwharizmi revolutionised mathematics (does the word algorithm sound just a bit arabic at all?), after the development of al-jibr (anyone here ever use Algebra in their job?), after the invention of the rather useful Zero, after the mapping of the skies (why do all those stars have names like al-Nilam, al-Nitak...), after Abu ibn-Sina (Avicenna) revolutionised medicine. It would be after the development of the pointed arches that underly so much of western architecture.
It's not as if Arab civilisation is a contradiction in terms. The tragedy is that, through whatever long and complicated route, Arab civilisation is in a pretty messy state at the moment. Mind you, a major step on that route came when a bunch of murderous thugs who were living in the third-world-of-the-time came over from Europe and started smashing things up in the name of religion (the things that were smashed include a society in which the Q'uranic requirement of respect for all the People Of The Book was upheld as a matter of faith an honour.) And by comarison with the Muslim world of the time, you'd hardly stretch the word 'civilised' to include the crusaders.
Of course, if the European 'great powers' (I'm english, so guilty as charged) hadn't marched in there at the end of the Ottoman Empire and started 80 years (so far) of exploitation on overlordry, redrawing all the borders to suit our commercial arrangements and to reward our puppets and cronies from the al-Saud family down, there might be a good deal more of the old civilisation intact today.
... islamic fundamentalists a such a peace loving people, committed to the continuation of "social peace" and avoid "crisis" at all costs. ...which might have some relevance here if the government of Egypt was an islamist fundamentalist government, rather than a secular government which has for decades been in 'crisis', trying to cope with an ongoing islamist fundamentalist revolution which has killed many hundreds of people and nurtured several of the most hard-core 'afghan' commanders. There's been no 'social peace' in Egypt for a very long time, and past experience suggests that allowing the showing of a film which portrays a supposed 'promised land' called, of all things, Zion (not provocative at all, eh?).
'Their social problems' are obviously not the result of western movies. However, their social problems do mean that the showing of this film could cause the sort of unrest that gets cinemas bombed. Which is turn leads to people getting killed. That's killed as in dead, as in bereaved relatives in mourning, as in families without breadwinners, as in, well, if you've had to deal with the death of a loved one you know what I'm talking about. Not as in 'OK, so roll me up another Agent Smith and let's continue the groovy action sequence'.
The government of Egypt is, effectively, more than 20 years into a civil war against the fundamentalists, and that does make a difference in this sort of decision. If it was Saudi Arabia or Iran we were talking about (or Yemen, Sudan, Pakistan, plenty of others to choose from) then, yes, it would be ludicrous. But it isn't. Very sad, yes, but while I'm entirely free to sacrifice MY life for my beliefs in freedom of speech, expression and so forth, I have absolutely NO right to sacrifice someone else's life for anything at all.
#2: Your hold on power is tenuous, and you cannot handle the slightest challenge to your authority. My money is on #2
Yes, the secular Mubarak government's hold on power is indeed tenuous, and has been since its inception in the aftermath of the Islamist assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat in 1981. It has, on the other hand, so far survived many, far from slight, challenges to its authority from groups including HizbAllah and Islamic Jihad, as well as major diplomatic hostility over its relatively good relations with Israel (the country also know as Zion, of course).
When people get killed regularly because the government is perceived as a puppet of some Zionist conspiracy, maybe it's reasonable to be a bit circumspect about a film depicting 'Zion' as the last haven of freedom for the human race?
Are they actually saying that someone inducing thought into their culture from the west might cause an uproar
I suspect they're saying that, in a country with a history of Islamist resistance, multiple assassination attempts on President Mubarak, semi-regular spates of suicide bombings which have killed hundreds of people over the last 20 years, a country which has long been a fertile recruiting ground for the various armed Islamist groups, from Ayman al-Zawahiri down, in a country which has been struggling to maintain a secular state while its leaders are condemned as apostates and traitors, puppets of a purported US agenda to corrupt the beliefs of devout muslims, religion matters.
It's a fine piece of entertainment, it's a thought-provoking piece of art maybe. But is it worth risking yet another islamist onslaught on the people of Egypt just to get this film shown? Because certainly past performance shows that introducing some thoughts from the west has caused the sort of uproar in which people get killed.
As long as you can afford to pay for the accidents you cause, you don't have to have insurance.
That's entirely fair, and in fact does have it's place in the UK system. Straight out of Uni, I worked for the Dept of the environment for a year, and one of my jobs was keeping the pool cars taxed. Which caused fun at the Post Office since there was no insurance certificate. The Government (strictly, The Crown) doesn't use insurance, it has Crown Idemnity instead - if you imagine the premia on all the governments vehicles, it's obviously cheaper to pay full damages for all the accidents/incidents that DO happen, than to pay premia against all those which don't.
The difficulty comes in demonstrating that an individual CAN afford to indemnify rather than insure. Let's say I'm driving my car and I hit a corner of Windsor Castle, taking out a tower and 100 tourists. That's going to need a pretty steep indemnity. So it might help a tiny handful of staggeringly rich individuals, but personally I couldn't possibly provide sufficient indemnity.
they'd be better off taxing gasoline, or the cars themselves upon manufacture or importation
Oh, they do. All of the above, fuel at about 80% of the pump price. But as I said in my earlier post, we basically don't hypothecate taxes here, including Vehicle Excise Duty ('road tax') or fuel taxes. £x bn goes into the Treasury, from multiple revenue streams, and £y bn goes out into various expenditure streams. But the black box in the middle doesn't distinguish betweeen revenue sources at all. At the Dept of Environment, it was bad news if a supplier screwed you around and you eventually got a refund, because the refund had to go to The Treasury and you certainly didn't get it back into the cost centre it originally came from.
Additionally, you could count the fee for a driving test, and the fee for a new or replacement license as additional taxes on motoring, plus the fee for the annual MOT test, the sales tax on spare parts and the labour on repairs and servicing. There's plenty of tax streams from motoring in place. And some irresponsible lunatics out there also seem to consider the penalties for dangerous driving practices such as speeding fines to be a tax on motoring as well, rather than as a fine for stupid, inconsiderate, selfish and criminal abuse of a one-ton lethal weapon</rant>. TomV
Slashdot Mirror
How dare you presume to tell me that I am not allowed to supervise the process by which my elected representative will speak in my name?
+20 insightful end of discussion game over I rather think.
TomV
We need electronic voting NOW
Why?
Now clearly, and regardless of one's views either way on the eventual outcome, the endgame of the last US Presidential Election made it pretty clear to those of us in the 'Rest Of World' that the US' much-vaunted electoral democracy is in need of a pretty thorough technical and procedural shakeup before it could be judged Fair, Free and Open to international standards. clearly these bizarre punch-card machines with all that 'chad' nonsense have to go as they're making any US claim to be a bastion of democracy look entirely farcical.
But does the solution to that problem automatically involve electronic ballots?
From an outsider's perspective, the problem with the 2000 election certainly suggested that those machines of yours are not up to the job. But then most countries don't use machines for that sort of thing, we use people, lots of people if need be, watched by other people, lots of those too, with clearly marked easily counted easily audited pieces of paper, one per vote per ballot (UK-wise we wouldn't have had the butterfly ballot issue because if n elections coincide, we get n ballot papers, one for each election). Straight binary, you put your one mark in the box for a specific candidate, or you spoilt your ballot, no resort to subjective decisions about 'hanging chads'.
Frankly, electronic voting would just be a shiny, expensive distraction from actually looking at the electoral system and identifying the most trustworthy way to operate within it. If it's going to take such an effort to get electronic voting trusted, then it must perforce fail the very first and most trivial test of a voting system.
So far as I can see, the main benefactors of electronic voting would be the TV networks as it would make scheduling on election night (and thereafter in the case of a disputed result) so much easier. I'm pretty sure Messrs Washington, Jefferson and Madison didn't have a major problem with waiting a couple of weeks for the results to come in and any problems resolved. In fact isn't that the whole point of your delayed-inauguration approach to the Presidency?
Do you really want 300 million people governed according to a voting system optimised for the convenience of media corporations? Wouldn't it be better to look at optimising it for representativeness instead?
TomV
even if the code is opensource, how can you be sure the voting machine executable has been compiled from the genuine source code ?
And herein lies a nice can of worms straight outta RISKS. Not only do we need to know that the binary in use has been compiled from the genuine source code, you also need to be confident that it was compiled with a trustworthy (preferably also Open-Sourced, GCC perhaps?) compiler in a trustworthy environment.
And then there's the firmware on the machine itself.
Geek that I am I can still see enormous strengths to our wonderfully archaic paper-ballot system here in the UK. You put a cross in a box on a piece of paper with a pen. If you mess up the cross you spoilt your ballot. At the count, for each person actually sorting and bundling ballot papers there are two people watching like a hawk (I tend to be one of these) to make sure they're counting and sorting OK. So long as the contituencies are reasonably sized, a result by the next morning seems OK when Right definitely outweighs Quick or Cheap. And therein lies the crux. So WHAT if it takes a week to get the correct result?
TomV
[Bill Gates:] "You can't ever take it and use it in a job creating activity."
Yeah, this was the bit where I spluttered. And I'm a total Moft-serf, i work pretty much entirely with Moft stuff, WinForms, ASP.net, MSSQLserver, on Win2k, but still, please, Bill?!
We're a fulfilment and marketing company. I may be Moft-boy, but it's pretty clear to me that if we were running Apache instead of IIS, Linux instead of win2k, A N Other database server (need those triggers, need those ACID transactions) instead of MSSQL, if we were writing it all in C++ or Python or Java or...
There would still be jobs in Client Services. There would still be jobs in the Call Centre. There would still be jobs in Data Capture, there would still be pick-and-pack jobs in the warehouse. There would still be jobs in Finance, there would still be jobs in Sales. There would still be developer and admin jobs in IT.
Bill, listen to the guy you just hired, the emotional stuff REALLY doesn't help (y)our case.
TomV
Sure, who can forget the classic scene in B7 where they go back to Earth and a robot spider thing jumps into the hick cop's asshole, while the sex slave/giant worm/pod person clone chick version #2 gets her kit off (again) and the zombie goth runs out of zombie goth go-juice (yet again).
The robot spider thing is in "The Harvest Of Kairos" (series C ep5), B7 had a psychotic, scheming, vampy campy manipulative white-clad dominatrix as head of Federation Space Command in the 'weird chick' role, unless telepathic guerilla chicks are more your thing, and the Zombie Goths (the federation Mutoids, or 'vampires') ran out of zombiegoth go-juice all too often to maintain any credibility as a fearsome fighting tool, but most especially in "Duel" (series A ep8).
Plus B7 had a nice line in murderous alien dwarf chess champions, living intelligent telepathic drugs, fiendishly clever psychostrategists, alien space plagues, bodysnatching invaders from the Andromeda galaxy, man-eating planet-sized supercomputers, Space Rats with dayglo mohicans on quad-bikes, a Tachyon Funnel...
No shortage of OTT in Blake's 7, made a nice foil to the totalitarian military-industrial state, the easy brutality of power, the working-class grime of the glorious future, betrayal, deceit, corruption and the eventual utter futility of resistance, I thought.
Blake's 7 does not date from the early 80's, it dates from 1978
Right on the mark. Series A Episode 1 "The Way Back" aired on 2nd Jan 1978, Series D Episode 13, "Blake" aired on 21st Dec 1981. So B7 very neatly spanned the cusp of 70s and 80s.
tomV
as long as the writing is up to the same standard (And hopefully Paul Darrow will make sure of that!)
If he's got any sense left at all, he'll get straight onto Chris Boucher for the scripts. While Terry Nation came up with the concept and nominally wrote most of the first season, as with his Doctor Who work which was all heavily retooled by the relevant Script Editor, Nation came up with the concepts, Boucher made it into workable scripts, and is still working in the same genre with very similar dramatic contexts. Boucher's good, hire Boucher.
TomV
Now that Alan Yentob is no longer its controller we may even get a sci-fi series on BBC1 again. IIRC he was the reason Dr Who was axed
Actually, it was Michael Grade who axed the show, he was quite determined to do it as he considered that it had become an embarrassment to the BBC in the state it had reached.
Yentob came later and is IIRC on record as having been a fan in his youth. and as for the stuff the current Controller, Lorraine Heggessey, has been saying about Doctor Who recently, it's mainly IP rights negotiations that are holding back televised SF on prime-time BBC.
TomV
Nothing new here at all. Paul Darrow acquired the rights to make new B7 from Terry Nation about 15 years ago and has been media-pushing it in the hope of getting some funds about once a year ever since. It's been 'about to return' as a movie or TV series for a long time now.
Which isn't to say that I don't consider it worthy of a return, but it is hard to see how an Avon spin-off could reasonably be called Blake's 7. OK so in the original series, seasons 3 & 4 were missing Blake, right up until the final, wonderful, paranoid apocalypse in the final episode, but it was Blake's crew, still basically on Blake's mission, and wanted by the Federtaion because of their history with Blake.
In any case, if you want a fix of Blake's 7 style grit and pessimism, I can strongly recommend Chris Boucher's "Kaldor City" audios, in which the Paul Darrow character could very easily be a post-Blake, in-hiding Avon, which also features various characters Boucher originally created for Blake's 7, all set in the society (and with some of the characters) he built for the Doctor Who classic "Robots of Death"
I'd say, use B7 as an inspiration, sure, but it was effectively brought full-circle in 'Blake' and anything more would rather spoil the delicious uncompromising bleakness of that final showdown. How often DO the bad guys get to win?
TomV
While we're still using hard-drives, though, things may yet change beyond recognition.
The other day I came across this discussion between Jim Gray (MS Research) and David Patterson (Pardee Prof. at UC Berkeley) suggesting among other things that if the disks get much bigger (Terabytes) they're likely to be serial-access rather than random-access (the return of mag-tape, but flatter, because that way you could read a 20TB disk in a day instead of a year), and the return of sneakernet (for terabytes of data, it's cheaper to fed-ex a computer set up as a fileserver containing the data on a hard-drive than it is to ftp it. And the bitrate's better with the 12-hour delivery from fed-ex.
TomV
What the market will bear pricing works only because of this artificial segmentation of markets
Or, put another way, we will never know 'what the market will bear' so long as we have artificial segmentation of markets, which is exactly why the vendors will cling tenaciously to this model for as long as they can possibly get away with it.
Either you/we *are* believers in Free Markets, or we're not. If we are, then the artificial segmentation and, especially, the agricultural subsidies have to go, as they are glaringly incompatible with the model, or you/we would be better off admitting that you/we believe in a regulated, mixed, semi-state-controlled (in USian, 'socialist') market model and try to regulate the mix more fairly than at present.
TomV
We might have extradition treaties with the UK, but to invoke it [...] would completely overrun law enforcement offices
Hardly. Since our home secretary signed away our rights on Extradition issues with the US, all the US authorities have to do is specify whom they would like extradited, and under our new treaty obligations, we have to hand them over. the defendant is not permitted to waste US time and resources by having the extradition questioned in a british court, is not allowed to waste US time and resources by demanding access to any evidence which might exist against him/her, is not allowed to waste US time and resources by expecting a prima facie case to be presented at all.
US demands, we get shipped off to the US, end of story. Hardly a legal burden at all, since there's no legal component to the whole process.
Rather elegantly, this means it's now possible for a UK citizen to go all the way from freedom to the death-chamber at Guantanamo without the tedious and expensive involvement of a single Judge, let alone a Jury. I suspect it's probably now *harder* to extradite someone from the next State than from the UK.
TomV (prole, Airstrip One)
free can also be achieved with
That should be enough to get you straight in there (assuming you've got a windows box to run it all on of course, but if not, then why even think about it?).
Now personally, I'm very very fond of Visual Studio.net, but for running up a quick, not-many-pages data-driven web app, the Web Matrix can sometimes be the superior tool (the major difference is that VS.net pretty much enforces code-behind and has multi-file projects, whilst the Web Matrix works with inline code and a single file at a time.
Certainly, the adoption has been slower then Microsoft would have liked, but then, my personal interpretation of the 'what is
Give it a try, have a play around (esp. the web Matrix) and see what you like and what you don't. If nothing else, you'll learn to love some of the details of your favourite environment more than you did before.
TomV
Watching those guys toss those bikes around as they were riding in the tour this morning really wish i had it that easy
Watching those guys toss those bikes around makes me wish i had Lance Armstrong's resting heart rate of 32-34 bpm rather than the adult male average of 70 bpm. Or Miguel Indurain's 30 bpm, 50 litres-per minute peak heart flow rate, 8 litre lung capacity, and ability to get 150bpm up a steep hill and drop it back to 60 bpm within 30 seconds on the descent.
Once I can get within sight of that, maybe it might be worth worrying about the equipment. As things stand, put Armstrong on a rubbish kid's bike and me on 5 grand's worth of state of the art, and Armstrong will take me to the cleaners every time.
One of the things I like about Formula 1 is the way that there are strictly speaking two world championships, the Constructor's and the Driver's. It's not unusual for the winning driver to come from an also-ran constructor, particularly if the Driver's Champ drives as a clear number one with a significantly worse team-mate, and the Constructor's champ team runs two equal, reliable cars and gets a lot of points between them. Last year, Schumacher (M) and Ferrari took both titles, this year, as things stand after 10 races, the Driver's seems to be between Schumacher (M) and Kimi Raikonnen of McLaren, though Ralf Schumacher's catching up fast in his Williams, but the Constructor's is between Ferrari and Williams, since McLaren have been having trouble getting both cars into the good points.
Now, clearly, if one car really is streets ahead of the rest (last year's Ferrari, the 1992 Williams FW14B (swoon!), the 1988 McLaren MP 4/4 in the hands of Senna and Prost), then both titles will go together. But at least in F1, it's possible for a beyond-hope geek to actually see the sport as a form of competitive engineering and project management with some incidental racetrack mayhem to provide the test results. And the ability of these people to achieve constant product improvements, ever-increasing reliability, outrageous crash-safety, better handling, better aerodynamics, lighter components, an easier drive even, would be pretty astonishing even if it weren't on a two-week turnaround cycle throughout the season.
And to get back to where we started, the F1 drivers tend to be quite sickeningly fit too.
TomV
there's no common identity number in the UK
National Insurance number - we all get a card on our 16th birthday - [A-Z]{2}[0-9]{6}[A-Z] - every adult legitimately resident in the UK has one.
TomV
I used to work for the British Civil Service
So did I, and you missed out my favourite holiday of all.
Queen's Birthday!
Or a day off in lieu if you worked it, and it was a great day to work since the offices were pretty much empty. When I first heard of it, as in "what are you doing next Wednesday?" I seriously thought they were taking the p*5*. But no, it was gloriously real.
TomV
If i've grasped SCO's approach so far, I can see them trying something along the lines of:
In which case a shareprice rise from 60 cents to 10 dollars is NOTHING.
Farcical, but at times it does begin to look as though the inheritance of the OS religious wars has come down to a claim by SCO that UNIX was indeed the 'one true OS' and that any other OS, by virtue simply of BEING an OS, must be a 'derived work' of same, and thus the rightful property of SCO.
Nice piece on chutzpah in yesterday's Guardian, by the way.
TomV
It's pretty clear. Several years ago, at the dawn of the OS now commonly known as "Linux", I read the original, true, eternal and ineffable Name of the OS, "GNU/Linux", decided that it was a bit unwieldy, thought about the GPL, optimised the Name a bit, and released my changes, along with instructions on how to implement them, as "Linux (just forget the GNU/ stuff, OK?)".
And this Fork of the Name, once a bit of extraneous stuff had been excised by other contributors, eventually became the name "Linux" used so widely today.
I can see that in the article, Stallman's point seems to be to reassure the PHB's reading zdnet that they don't need to suddenly get rid of all their Free Software because of the SCO case, that they needn't retreat into the arms of Closed software.
And I can utterly appreciate that he wants fair credit for the vast amount of work the GNU project put into "Linux", I just find it a tad odd that he can make such a cogent, consistent case for the Freedom of the software, whilst in the same breath telling off anyone who changes the name of the software.
TomV
Since that IP was licenced under the GPL, SCO/Caldera has no right to use it unless they release it under the GPL as well.
As far as I can gather, SCO's position seems to be, at its heart, that the old UNIX System V AT&T license (or rather, every single one of the numerous SysV licenses, AIX, Dynix, etc) was, to use a Ballmer-ism, 'viral', unstoppably so, in their view.
They've been pretty clear that anything designed to work with any flavour of UNIX, by anyone in possession of any variant of the SysV licence, is in their opinion, automatically part of 'the UNIX intellectual property'. Therefore, for example, because Sequent developed their NUMA code whilst bound by a SysV license for Dynix, SCO's position seems to be that NUMA is automatically theirs.
And from that position, it's easy to see how SCO would make the leap to claiming that there's no GPL issue with Linux, because ALL of the Linux code, due to the supposedly viral nature of the Sys V licenses, is theirs to start with, so not only would they claim the absolute right to distribute the Linux code as they please, they would also tend to the view that no one, not Torvalds, not Stallman, can claim any ownership of anything which interoperates with any system derived from any system with any ancestry which might have involved a viral SysV license. In SCO's view, if it works with UNIX, it's their property regardless of any other factors.
Now clearly this looks like a lot of self-serving boholox, but i can believe that the old (convicted monopolist, remember) AT&T might very well have put some thoroughly draconian terms into their licenses, and, horrifyingly, if the sysV licenses do turn out to be viral, then SCO wins, hands down.
tomV
I'd like to take issue with the comment that: [t]he fact is that if I sit a 4 year old in front of the ARTS channel all day they aren't going to come out with an appreciation of classical music.
:-) ? And I learned to imitate what I'd encountered, or why would I still catch myself whistling bits of sonatas and symphonies?
My parents, born in the 1930's, never really got accultured to 'rock and roll'. I grew up in a house where 'pop' music, if played at all, meant stuff like Ella Fitzgerald or maybe a bit of Harry Belafonte. But really, 'music' meant classical, romantic, early C20th avant-garde.
Until I was about 10, I pretty much hadn't heard any music that didn't fall into the rather broad category summarized as 'classical'. And it seems rather hard for me to work out what, other than being sat down with BBC Radio 3 (very much a 'classical' station), led to me having an 'appreciation of classical music'. If I hadn't been exposed to quite a lot of it, how did I work out that J S Bach's all about sublime crystalline purity, that Sibelius is about huge, sweeping angst and yearning, that Brahms drives me to distraction, that Beethoven wrote the best tunes, or that Schoenberg hurts my ears
But then, as a child, I was heavily oppressed and brainwashed, with only the most carefully selected cultural propaganda allowed into the house. Out of choice, I have probably loved to watch big flashy loud stuff with explosions and fast action sequences and so forth, but we, the children, did not have control of the TV. Our thought processes and interpretations of the world were carefully, and selectively guided and trained according to my parents' views.
Thanks Mum, thanks Dad, for taking that responsibility and not leaving it to people who need first and foremost to sell advertising.
TomV
Did all the genetics leave that place after the pharoahs fell?
well, if 'all the genetics [left] that place...' at all, it would have been a lot later. After al-Kwharizmi revolutionised mathematics (does the word algorithm sound just a bit arabic at all?), after the development of al-jibr (anyone here ever use Algebra in their job?), after the invention of the rather useful Zero, after the mapping of the skies (why do all those stars have names like al-Nilam, al-Nitak...), after Abu ibn-Sina (Avicenna) revolutionised medicine. It would be after the development of the pointed arches that underly so much of western architecture.
It's not as if Arab civilisation is a contradiction in terms. The tragedy is that, through whatever long and complicated route, Arab civilisation is in a pretty messy state at the moment. Mind you, a major step on that route came when a bunch of murderous thugs who were living in the third-world-of-the-time came over from Europe and started smashing things up in the name of religion (the things that were smashed include a society in which the Q'uranic requirement of respect for all the People Of The Book was upheld as a matter of faith an honour.) And by comarison with the Muslim world of the time, you'd hardly stretch the word 'civilised' to include the crusaders.
Of course, if the European 'great powers' (I'm english, so guilty as charged) hadn't marched in there at the end of the Ottoman Empire and started 80 years (so far) of exploitation on overlordry, redrawing all the borders to suit our commercial arrangements and to reward our puppets and cronies from the al-Saud family down, there might be a good deal more of the old civilisation intact today.
TomV
... islamic fundamentalists a such a peace loving people, committed to the continuation of "social peace" and avoid "crisis" at all costs.
...which might have some relevance here if the government of Egypt was an islamist fundamentalist government, rather than a secular government which has for decades been in 'crisis', trying to cope with an ongoing islamist fundamentalist revolution which has killed many hundreds of people and nurtured several of the most hard-core 'afghan' commanders. There's been no 'social peace' in Egypt for a very long time, and past experience suggests that allowing the showing of a film which portrays a supposed 'promised land' called, of all things, Zion (not provocative at all, eh?).
'Their social problems' are obviously not the result of western movies. However, their social problems do mean that the showing of this film could cause the sort of unrest that gets cinemas bombed. Which is turn leads to people getting killed. That's killed as in dead, as in bereaved relatives in mourning, as in families without breadwinners, as in, well, if you've had to deal with the death of a loved one you know what I'm talking about. Not as in 'OK, so roll me up another Agent Smith and let's continue the groovy action sequence'.
The government of Egypt is, effectively, more than 20 years into a civil war against the fundamentalists, and that does make a difference in this sort of decision. If it was Saudi Arabia or Iran we were talking about (or Yemen, Sudan, Pakistan, plenty of others to choose from) then, yes, it would be ludicrous. But it isn't. Very sad, yes, but while I'm entirely free to sacrifice MY life for my beliefs in freedom of speech, expression and so forth, I have absolutely NO right to sacrifice someone else's life for anything at all.
TomV
#2: Your hold on power is tenuous, and you cannot handle the slightest challenge to your authority.
My money is on #2
Yes, the secular Mubarak government's hold on power is indeed tenuous, and has been since its inception in the aftermath of the Islamist assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat in 1981. It has, on the other hand, so far survived many, far from slight, challenges to its authority from groups including HizbAllah and Islamic Jihad, as well as major diplomatic hostility over its relatively good relations with Israel (the country also know as Zion, of course).
When people get killed regularly because the government is perceived as a puppet of some Zionist conspiracy, maybe it's reasonable to be a bit circumspect about a film depicting 'Zion' as the last haven of freedom for the human race?
TomV
Are they actually saying that someone inducing thought into their culture from the west might cause an uproar
I suspect they're saying that, in a country with a history of Islamist resistance, multiple assassination attempts on President Mubarak, semi-regular spates of suicide bombings which have killed hundreds of people over the last 20 years, a country which has long been a fertile recruiting ground for the various armed Islamist groups, from Ayman al-Zawahiri down, in a country which has been struggling to maintain a secular state while its leaders are condemned as apostates and traitors, puppets of a purported US agenda to corrupt the beliefs of devout muslims, religion matters.
It's a fine piece of entertainment, it's a thought-provoking piece of art maybe. But is it worth risking yet another islamist onslaught on the people of Egypt just to get this film shown? Because certainly past performance shows that introducing some thoughts from the west has caused the sort of uproar in which people get killed.
TomV
As long as you can afford to pay for the accidents you cause, you don't have to have insurance.
That's entirely fair, and in fact does have it's place in the UK system. Straight out of Uni, I worked for the Dept of the environment for a year, and one of my jobs was keeping the pool cars taxed. Which caused fun at the Post Office since there was no insurance certificate. The Government (strictly, The Crown) doesn't use insurance, it has Crown Idemnity instead - if you imagine the premia on all the governments vehicles, it's obviously cheaper to pay full damages for all the accidents/incidents that DO happen, than to pay premia against all those which don't.
The difficulty comes in demonstrating that an individual CAN afford to indemnify rather than insure. Let's say I'm driving my car and I hit a corner of Windsor Castle, taking out a tower and 100 tourists. That's going to need a pretty steep indemnity. So it might help a tiny handful of staggeringly rich individuals, but personally I couldn't possibly provide sufficient indemnity.
they'd be better off taxing gasoline, or the cars themselves upon manufacture or importation
Oh, they do. All of the above, fuel at about 80% of the pump price. But as I said in my earlier post, we basically don't hypothecate taxes here, including Vehicle Excise Duty ('road tax') or fuel taxes. £x bn goes into the Treasury, from multiple revenue streams, and £y bn goes out into various expenditure streams. But the black box in the middle doesn't distinguish betweeen revenue sources at all. At the Dept of Environment, it was bad news if a supplier screwed you around and you eventually got a refund, because the refund had to go to The Treasury and you certainly didn't get it back into the cost centre it originally came from.
Additionally, you could count the fee for a driving test, and the fee for a new or replacement license as additional taxes on motoring, plus the fee for the annual MOT test, the sales tax on spare parts and the labour on repairs and servicing. There's plenty of tax streams from motoring in place. And some irresponsible lunatics out there also seem to consider the penalties for dangerous driving practices such as speeding fines to be a tax on motoring as well, rather than as a fine for stupid, inconsiderate, selfish and criminal abuse of a one-ton lethal weapon</rant>.
TomV